Ravaged physically and beaten down mentally, Valour FC has reached a crossroads moment in its 2021 Canadian Premier League season.

Now one rung below the final playoff spot and missing its leading scorer in Austin Ricci after he was injured in last Wednesday’s Canadian Championship quarterfinal loss to Forge FC, Valour has 10 matches left to get up off the mat and continue to throw punches at its opponents… or stumble back to their corner and watch a season which began with so much promise wither away.

“There’s no other way about it now,” said Valour captain Daryl Fordyce in a chat with valourfootball.club prior to Saturday’s home match with Cavalry FC. “It’s either go down fighting or just give up. And if you’re going to give up you might as well go look for another career because professional soccer, professional sports in general, is a results-based business.

“That’s not us. Valour doesn’t give up. We won’t give up.”

Valour has just one win and one draw against eight losses in its last 10 matches in CPL play. They did knock off Atlético Ottawa in the opening round of the Canadian Championship, but were then eliminated from that competition in Wednesday’s loss in Hamilton.

That match truly was a case of two halves, as Valour looked flat in the first half – ‘placid’ was the word GM and head coach Rob Gale used – but was on the attack in the final half.

And that work in the final 45 of the loss to Forge, everyone in Valour colours insists, has to be their blueprint going forward.

“It was like two different teams for us (Wednesday) night,” Fordyce said. “First half we were nothing, really. We didn’t show anything. We were too deep, we let Forge come on to us and if you give a team like that respect they’re going to damage you. We couldn’t get out of our half.

“The second half, we had nothing to lose. As I said to the boys at halftime, ‘Get your composure. Get some steel into you and let’s go for it.’ We basically went man for man in the second half and got after them. We did leave ourselves a little bit open at the back at times, but we had to go forward and Matt (Silva, goalkeeper) stood up for us. We took the game to them, got ourselves and back in it and if a couple of calls had gone our way we might have been able to fight back for a draw and taken it to penalties. It’s just so tough coming back from 2-nil down at halftime.”

Fordyce said he has seen team flash its skill brilliantly in training sessions but in the first half against Forge – and perhaps as evidence of the pressure mounting with the recent slide – there were again too many errors, both mentally and physically.

Clearly that has to change going forward.

“It’s very easy to blame tactics or decisions or whatever, but at the end of the day it’s individual errors or decisions that is costing us – me included,” said Fordyce. “We all have analyze those things ourselves and work toward making it better.

“You’ve heard the expression of the ‘fear of failure.’ There are a lot of athletes who become afraid to make a mistake or afraid of losing and it can hamper their individual performance. I’m an older player coming to the end of my career and I can remember when I was younger sometimes becoming really uptight before games or uncertain about what my job is.

“The game has evolved massively and it’s very tactical. But it’s not just tactical, it’s a technical game and there’s a psychological part to it, too. You need all three of those traits to be successful and I think we’re lacking in all three of them, to be honest, to be brutally honest. We have to look at ourselves. There’s no getting away from it.”

Still, there’s also a danger of going too far here as well. It’s the old ‘paralysis by over-analysis’ syndrome. What Valour hopes to do is follow the profile of playing smart and free – as they have done for stretches this season – beginning with Saturday’s match against Cavalry and then going forward.

“If you look at it this way, we won the second half 1-nil against Forge,” said Fordyce. “That’s how we have to look at it now and get going again. We’re stuck in a little rut at the moment. It’s not a nice place to be, for sure, but it’s how we handle it now. As long as we’re enthusiastic about winning games, then once we do start winning again then who knows. Our goal is to finish Top 4 and that’s still on for us.

“We left everything out there in the second half against Forge. That’s what we did in the bubble – we left absolutely everything out there. It’s very easy to make excuses, but I’ve never been one to do that. If you have a few injuries, if you have a lot of travel, or the weather is bad… that’s a challenge. Can you overcome that challenge? That’s what the most-successful teams do. They don’t sit back and feel sorry for themselves. They get back up and get ready to go again. That makes you resilient if you learn to continue to do that.”